Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoMike Stewart | ASSOCIATED PRESSClemson players are led toward the field, but first they must touch “Howard’s Rock,” which belonged to former Tigers coach Frank Howard in the 1960s.

Some years end in a bountiful harvest. Other times are fraught with drought.

Through it all, good and bad, the farmer toils with relentless passion.

That’s football at Clemson University, where the best season ever was produced by a man who knows how to work the land.

Danny Ford coached the Tigers to their only national championship with an undefeated season in 1981. A year later, Clemson gave him a new contract calling for the school to purchase him a 147-acre farm about 8 miles from campus.

“I did farm while I was the coach,” said Ford, who went 96-29-4 in 11 full seasons with the Tigers. “As part of my contract, I got 10 acres for every year I stayed at Clemson.”

Ford stayed and still works the farm (now 174 acres) at age 65, long after being forced to resign as coach in January 1990 amid an NCAA scandal.

Good and bad has sprouted at Clemson, just like the soil.

Around Ohio State, Clemson will always be associated with a bad, wet night 35 years ago in Jacksonville, Fla., when Woody Hayes’ iconic career with the Buckeyes ended in ugly fashion.

Mention Clemson — OSU’s opponent in the Orange Bowl on Friday — in Columbus and someone will say the name Charlie Bauman. He was the Tigers nose guard who was slugged by Hayes as a Gator Bowl loss seeped into the waning moments of what became his final game as Ohio State coach.

However, down in Clemson, S.C. — population 16,562, not counting the school’s enrollment of 14,000 — that fit of fateful temper by Hayes is but another seed of a vast memory field tilled by the Tigers since they first played football in 1896.

Clemson has been marked by occasional scandal and grand success, none greater than that ’81 season capped by an Orange Bowl victory over Nebraska that earned the Tigers a national title in the polls.

The stakes aren’t so high for the Tigers as they return to the Orange Bowl, their second such trip in three years and 36th bowl appearance. Yet the game will be encased with the customary craziness that orange-clad Clemson fans have forever exuded.

Clemson, after all, is where its first football coach, Walter Riggs, later became the school’s sixth president and served from 1911 to ’24.

And it’s where the team’s longtime trainer, Herman McGee, was buried in an orange coffin after his death in 1980.

“They live and die with their college football here,” said Terry Kinard, a two-time All-America defensive back and member of Clemson’s ’81 national title team. “The fact that we don’t have a professional team here in South Carolina, that’s a big part of why the people here love their football.”

Those folks make Memorial Stadium, known as Death Valley, the state’s second-largest city on days of Clemson home games. More than 80,000 fill the seats, and thousands more clog the streets of the tiny town.

“On game day, if you don’t know how to go, you just can’t get nowhere,” Ford said.

Although the Tigers, members of the Atlantic Coast Conference, will be playing Ohio State in south Florida, good luck trying to squeeze into the Sloan Street Tap Room in downtown Clemson on game night.

“You can get in, but you’ll have to turn sideways,” said Jimmy Howard, owner of the bar for 34 years.

Howard, 72, played fullback for the Tigers in the early 1960s and is the son of legendary Clemson coach Frank Howard, who was to that school what Hayes was to OSU, albeit with more humor and less hubris.

Frank Howard went 165-118-12, won two Southern Conference championships and six ACC titles, and enjoyed six bowl victories while coaching the Tigers for 30 seasons starting in 1940. He never signed a contract after losing a copy of his original one-year deal.

Not really. Howard, who had a high annual salary of $25,000, was Clemson’s athletic director until his mandatory retirement in 1971. He kept an office at the school and went there five days a week until he died in 1996 at age 86.

“Coach Howard is never going to die in South Carolina,” Ford said.

Howard is a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, and the field at Memorial Stadium is named in his honor. Clemson also has “Howard’s Rock,” a white flint rock from Death Valley, Calif., that a former Tigers player gave the coach in the mid-1960s.

That rock sat in Howard’s office, sometimes serving as a doorstop. He was going to throw it out in 1966, but the booster club instead mounted the rock on a pedestal and placed it on top of the hill at the stadium’s east end.

In a tradition still played out, every Clemson player touches Howard’s Rock before running down the hill to take the field before a game’s kickoff.

“When you’re on top of that hill, and those people are screaming and yelling, and you touch that rock, and that cannon goes off, it’s a rush,” said Kinard, who will attend Friday’s game as a new inductee into the Orange Bowl Hall of Fame.

Howard cultivated football success at Clemson after the seed had been planted by his predecessor, Jess Neely, and another coach with a famous name: John Heisman — yes, the trophy guy — coached the Tigers to a 19-3-2 record from 1900 to ’03.

Three decades after Heisman departed, Howard and Neely started the fund-raising group IPTAY — which stands for “I Pay Ten A Year” — to help the football program. Clemson fans, many of them farmers, managed to support their beloved Tigers during the Great Depression.

“Some people would load up turnips and give them to the team’s dining hall,” Jimmy Howard said. “That was their donation.”

The booster club’s growth led to Clemson’s first bowl appearance, a Howard-produced win over Boston College in the 1940 Cotton Bowl. His ’48 team went 11-0, and he took the Tigers to six bowls between ’49 and ’59.

Howard also used salesmanship to make Clemson a charter member of the ACC in 1954 — one year after the school admitted female students — and to grow football’s popularity in the agricultural state.

“He had to be a

showman type of person,” Ford said. “He told me he would call other coaches before the start of the season and say, ‘Now listen, I’m going to talk ugly about you all year, but it’s going to help us make money by bringing in bigger crowds.’ ”

Clemson’s fan base swelled when it found shared identity in the small land-grant school, especially when the rival state university — South Carolina — turned up its nose at the neighboring Tigers.

“When Coach Howard was coaching,” Ford said, “and they were playing at South Carolina, a plane flew over the stadium and they threw out a chicken. The South Carolina people would always get on the PA system and say, ‘There’s a John Deere in the parking lot that left its lights on.’ ”

With a sense of unity, Clemson fans have reveled in 18 conference championships and shown a farmer’s persistence in difficult days.

“There ain’t nothing else to do around here much except go to sporting events,” Jimmy Howard said, “and football is king here.”